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I frankly am bored by the vanilla view you get with wide field instruments. Sure, there is a vast continuum in the image quality and depth of popular, and not so popular targets, but the image scale is soooo repetitive.
Moving up the focal length scale is a challenging, but in doing so you discover a gelato-shop full of colour and flavour that makes vanilla look ordinary.
You need a big sensor to cover a reasonable field of view at focal length of 3400mm. Getting at perfectly corrected field across a 50mm diagonal, with no edge distortions or camera tilt is also costly and difficult. Any tiny glitch in tracking, or system rigidity rears its ugly head and produces eggy stars in good seeing and in poor seeing, they bloat into fuzz-balls.
The up-side is you can highlight really interesting structures that are barely hinted at in wide-field views.
As for resolution, I have yet to take an image with my 305mm F3.8 system that matches the fine details that my 400mm F8 system can capture. "nearly as good" does not cut it IMHO.
That said, ultra wide and deep views can be really interesting, particularly when you mosaic multiple frames (read: lots of work).
But to answer your question does wide field rule? I'd say not, and have the runs on the board to back that view up.
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